Also, it is my impression that coders are often reluctant to ask what
seems like very basic questions, because they know how much effort you
and Mitch are already putting into GIMP devlopment, and know that basic
questions are often the kind that take the most effort to answer.

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Well, that is, please excuse me, very stupid. We aren't putting our
free time into cleaning up the code for ourselves only. We would love
to see more people working on the core and I would very much
appreciate if you could stop spreading this FUD that hacking the core
would be something that only experts could consider to do.

I have to back up Sven here.

I am currently trying to get my nose in the code by submitting patches
to easy-fix bugs. I asked him and other developers very stupid questions
and they always have answered nicely and helpfully. It is quite obvious
that they will help people trying to hack the core, as these very people
can become Gimp developers later, and giving them some answers when they
are stuck is far more productive than doing it for them. It took them
between 15 seconds and 3 minutes to answer each of my stupid questions,
which is far less than the time required to build a tutorial. And above
all, trying to make my way into the code before giving up and shamefully
asking those questions, made me understand the Gimp code a bit more each
time, which you cannot achieve if you only follow a tutorial written for
you.

The Gimp developers took the time to add 'easy-fix' keyword to some
bugs. This can be seen as a waste of time as they could fix these
themselves in short time, but it would be harder for beginners to help
them and they may lose some help offers. What I am trying to tell is :
if Sven says it's easy, then it is. Maybe you'll struggle with some
parts of the code, but if you try it and ask precise questions when
you're lost I am positive you'll get an answer to help you go on.

Granted, this takes some time, but it is no duty and you can do it at
your pace (mine is very slow!)